The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [46]
"Isabel, hon," "Janice dear," in his hoarse, thin black voice. Einhom, however, didn't have such sentiments at all, whatever sentiments he entertained on other scores. He took the joking liberties his father did, but his jokes didn't have the same ring; which isn't to say that they weren't funny but that he cast himself forward on them toward a goal--seduction. Whai the laugh was about was his disability; he was ^ter a fashion laughing about it, and he was not so secretly saying to women that if they'd look further they'd find to their surprise that there ^s the real thing, not disabled. He promised. So that when he worked his wicked, lustful charm, apparently so safe, like a worldly priest or elderly gentleman from v/hom it's safe to accept a little complimentary badinage or tickle, he was really singlemindediy and grimly fixed on the one thing, ultimately the thing, for which men and women came together. And he was the same with them all; not, of course, foreseeino any great success, but hoping all the same that one of them--beautiful, forward, intrigued with him, wishing to play a secret game, maybe a trifle perverse (he suggested), would see, would grasp, would crave, burn for him. He looked and hoped for this in every woman. He wouldn't stay a cripple, Einhom; he couldn't hold his soul in it. Sometimes it was dreadful, this; he'd lose everything he'd thought through uncountable times to reconcile himself to it, and be like the wolf in the pit in the zoo who keeps putting his muzzle to the corners of the walls, back and forth, in his exhibition jail. It didn't happen often; probably not oftener than ordinary people get a shove of the demon. But it happened. Touch him when he was off his feed, or had a cold and a little fever, or when there was a rift in the organization, or his position didn't feel so eminent and he wasn't getting the volume of homage and mail he needed--or when it was the turn of a feared truth to come up unseen through the multitude of elements out of which he composed his life, and then he'd say, "I used to think I'd either walk or swallow iodine, and I'd have massages and exercises, and drills when I'd concentrate on a single muscle and think I was building it up by my will, and it was all the bunk, Augie, the Coue theory, etcetera. For the birds. And It Can Be Done and the sort of stuff that bigshot Teddy Roosevelt wrote in his books. Nobody'11 ever know all the things I tried before I finally decided it was no go. I couldn't take it, and I took it. And I can't take it, yet I do take it. But how! You can get along twenty-nine days with your trouble, but there's always that thirtieth day when goddammit you can't, when you feel like the stinking fly in the first cold snap, when you look about and think you're the Old Man of the Sea locked around Sinbad's neck; and why should anybody carry an envious piece of human junk? If society had any sense they'd give me euthanasia or leave me the way the Eskimos do their old folks in an igloo with food for two days. Don't you look so miserable. Go on away. See if Tillie wants you for something." But this was on the thirtieth day, or more seldom, because in general he enjoyed good health and looked on himself as a useful citizen and even an extraordinary one, and he bragged that there was hardly anything he couldn't bring off if he put his mind to it. And he certainly did some bang-up things. He'd clear us all out of the way to be alone with Lollie Fewter; he'd arrange for the whole lot of us to drive out to Niles Center and show the Commissioner a piece of property. Ostensibly get78 tine ready to occupy himself with a piece of work while we were away--the files and information were laid out for him--he was unhurried, engagine. and smooth-tempered in his tortoiseshells, answering every last question in full and even detaining the excursion to have some last words with his father about frontages or improvements. "Wait till I show you on the map just where the feeder-bus comes through. Bring the map, Augie." He'd have me fetch it and kept the Commissioner till